Wednesday, March 30, 2005

We've been working hard to keep pumping out new strips. We feel like proud parents ("My Two Dads"-style) when we see how the content on the site has grown in the past few weeks. Please leave any death threats or effusive praise in the comments below! We'd love to hear from you!

In other news, we've both been in a huge comics-reading binge lately, and it's been ridiculously fun. Last night I finished re-reading the AMAZING Adolf series by Osamu Tezuka (conveniently available via our VIZ ads on the lower-left column) and finished another slice of his masterpiece with Phoenix: Volume 3. Other recent purchases have included Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and a new copy of Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show by Suehiro Maruo (via Blast Books, thanks you!). Then, we're all going out to see SIN CITY this Friday--- what an exciting time for comic book nerds! (ps. Fantastic Four looks like utter garbage--- but you already knew that, didn't you?)

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

quick update!-- just picked this up last week at my local shop. It's The Comics Journal: Special Edition Volume 5. As usual, everything that TCJ puts out is incredibly detailed and great to look at--- but this one particularly is WONDERFUL! It features, huge full-page reproduction of Maruo and Hino panels, a long history of Tezuka's work (included info on lots of his lesser known stories) and an INTERVIEW with HIDESHI HINO! There is a pic of him at the San Diego Comic Con 2004 (where i was lucky! enough to meet him briefly), and the guy looks as cool as a cucumber. Definitely pick this one up if you can spare the $$$.

Monday, March 14, 2005

sorry for the delay! Happy to say that Evan is back and we celebrated his arrival by checking out the live-action Cutie Honey movie in Berkeley with friends. We'll continue the celebration tonight, at Guitar Wolf!

As promised, here is a previously untranslated, 4-page story by Suehiro Maruo. This story was written in 1989, as the death of Hirohito and the end of the Showa period loomed large in Japanese news. We're currently rocking the Heisei period, but this strip takes on the demons of Japan's periods of "modern" history (Meiji, Taisho, Showa). ENJOY!

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Just heard from Evan last night-- he was in Wendover, Utah just about to reach the Nevada border. From what I remember from our crosscountry drive 3.5 years ago, there ain't nothing out there except salt flats and desert. As promised, we will be updating as soon as he gets back and we can put finishing touches on a few more strips.

Since we won't have any new comics online until SATURDAY, I wanted to share a few morsels of awesomeness with you all. If you haven't seen or read these strips yet, I do recommend making an Amazon order, or doing some scouting of ebay or your local used book crypts for the collections they can be found in.

SECRET COMICS JAPAN

This book is the lesser of the two books I'll mention here, but definitely has a few moments of brilliance. There is an early strip illustrated by Junko Mizuno (but thankfully not written by her-- sorry, not a HUGE fan of her storylines, just her aesthetic!) and a few other grotesque jems. The huge winner here is a story by Shintaro Kago called "Punctures."
This story freaked me out quite thoroughly when I first read it as a freshman in college (borrowed the book from Evan, naturally), and it has been one that I find myself mentioning and describing to friends often. The story revolves around a man so stricken with anxiety of accidental injury or damage to his property that he begins drilling (and later CARVING) holes into things like his milk carton, books, automobile and eventually his own body. (Afraid of being poked by a fellow commuter's umbrella, he stabs a preemptive hole into his own eye!).

The climax of the story takes the irrational, hyper-paranoid concept to frightening ends and really pleased me (in a sick sortof contentment that Kago actually went THAT FAR). Okay, okay-- the purpose of this blog isn't to post comic reviews, but I wanted to whet appetites enough that everyone would track this one down. It is right up their with Sakyo Komatsu's short story "The Savage Mouth" as chilling stuff that really opened up my eyes and still feels as visceral and speculatively fantastic today.

more info on his newer works here. I've also added his official site (in japanese) to our links!

Comics Underground JAPAN

man, what a winner! This book is the one that really blew the doors open for me, the book that showed me that manga wasn't just CLAMP and RANMA (right, right... takahashi rumiko is GOOD, like, maison ikkoku made me cry alright?-- but her stuff IS LIMITED in scope-- it's just soap operas, really awesome soap operas mind you!, but still) and wretchedly masculine/boring stuff like GTO and SLAM DUNK.

How is this for a primer?-- this book contains stories by Suehiro Maruo, Hideshi Hino, Carol Shimoda and Yamada Hanako!! Not every single story is perfect, but this book was where I first read Maruo's classic "Planet of the Jap" and saw "Mary's Asshole," an refreshingly femme and depraved blackcomedy strip (and the author is a radical, middle-aged woman!). Also, I remember Evan used to have a "Mary's Asshole" keychain for his bookbag, depicting a woman nursing a chimpanzee. wheeeee!

The comics in this book (along with "Punctures") feel like they should be pieced together with Lynch, Chronenberg, Miike (especially "Gozu"), "atrocity ukiyo-e" of the 19th century and all that is great about short gag strips. OH, and the sexiness of Weimar/Taisho uniforms.

To tide you over until we are back to updating new strips, here is Selfish Carol's Summer Vacation ENJOY! ps. if anyone knows of places other than these two books to find translated stories by Carol Shimoda or Yamada Hanako, we would love to hear about it in the comments' section!

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Got a call from nate who was out in NYC this weekend-- He was at the Manhattan store of the AWESOME used-book chain BOOK OFF. (i had no idea that they had a u.s. store!?). Anyway, he picked up a copy of the Japanese version of Hideshi Hino's Panorama of Hell!

This was a totally awesome find and I gotta thank Nate for thinking of me and this blog while he was out there. This book has been translated into English, but the only version of it was put out by Blast Books in 1990-- it's actually really hard to track down a cheap version of it, so maybe we will try our own hand at translating and putting it online for free at some point down the line!

of course, if you can ever get your hands on either Hell Baby or Panorama of Hell (in english!) for cheap, we totally recommend these early Hino classics!

Friday, March 04, 2005

Thanks to everyone for the intial feedback on the blog! We're REALLY HAPPY with the nice things we've been hearing and are looking forward to churning out tons of new strips in the coming weeks

Evan is currently on a road trip and wont be back online properly for about a week. So! We will be posting one more Yoshida Sensha comic this weekend, and then will be sortof MIA for a bit while we regroup. coming soon: more YOSHIDA SENSHA, a new 4-page Maruo story and some horror mini-classics by Umezu!

Please spread the url around to your friends and keep checking back for updates!